The Grower vs. The Shower: Talent Identification Myths

The Greatest High School Athlete Ever Was Cut From Three Teams

ESPN rated Jim Ryun as the number one high school phenom in history, ahead of LeBron and Tiger. If it seems unbelievable that a bunch of basketball, football, and baseball writers would pick a runner over LeBron, it’s likely because you don’t know Ryun’s story.

In short, he became the first high school boy to run under the 4 minute mile as a junior. This was just a decade after Bannister broke the mythical barrier. As a senior, he dropped his time down to 3:55.3, in a race where he beat the previous year’s Olympic Gold and Silver medalist. He set the American record and was the fourth fastest man in history, just a touch off the world record. He was legitimately one of the best in history as a high school kid in a sport dominated by 20-something year olds. His high school record is so good, that it took nearly 40 years for someone to break it. And still, 60 years later, there’s only been one American high schooler to run faster, despite crazy advances in tracks, shoes, training, supplements, and more.

It’s painted as a story of a phenom, of insane talent. But more than his peers like LeBron and Tiger who showed prowess at an early age, Ryun’s success provides clues the rest of us can actually use beyond “have great genetics.”

Growing up, Ryun was awful at just about every sport he tried. And he tried all of them. As he told me “I wasn't able to make an athletic team. I'd been cut from the junior high basketball team, the junior high track team, and then I was cut from the church baseball team, which tells you a lot about where I was going to go."

When he finally found running, the spark wasn’t instant either. As he relayed, “"I remember the first time I made a team, it was last man on the C team, which meant I was 21st on the cross country team. And while that wasn't, you know, phenomenal in any sense of the word, it was a beginning point."

The first mile race he ever ran was only 5:38. To put that into context for the non-track folks, I ran 30 seconds faster in 8th grade off no training. And my wife ran essentially the same time as Ryun in 7th grade. It wasn’t awful, but by no means indicated anything special.

Ryun’s talent only expressed when he started training. And when it did, he shined in a big way. That sophomore year he made it all the way from 5:38 down to sub-4:10. His coach told him he could be the first high school boy to break 4, and the rest is history.

Too often, when it comes to talent, we think of it as this magic spark. Once you find the match, you’ll know instantly. We see it as the Tiger Woods phenomenon, the kid at age 3 who somehow can swing a golf club really well. Whether it’s an athlete, writer, or musician, we call them ‘natural’ because it seems like they’ve been blessed with a gift.

But more often than not, there’s another kind of talent. The type that Ryun possessed that needs training to uncover it. For those who don’t know, Ryun was known for his insane training. As a high school kid he was doing 40x400m repeats, spending hours at the track going round and round. Looking back, Ryun marvels that he didn’t get hurt or over trained. Or, “"As one of my sons lovingly said, 'Dad, you were a freak. Look at all those workouts. How'd you do it?”

But the crazy training is what uncovered his talent. It wasn’t readily apparent until he’d spent time doing the thing.

I call this the grower vs. shower talent phenomenon. Some people, you just watch them run or play music for the first time, and their talent shines through. Others, it takes training before you see that they have a lot of potential.

This pattern isn't unique to sport. It runs through how we think about passion in general.

Your Mindset for Passion

Far too often, we discount the growers. We don’t give people a chance to see how they respond to training or coaching. We label them as not very good and brush them to the side. It’s often only in no-cut sports like cross-country that those people are given the opportunity to see what they can do.

It’s not just in sport that this occurs. When we look at developing our passions, most people think it should be kind of like a Disney fairy tale. We find the right prince or princess, and the magic is undeniable early on. According to the latest science, 78 percent of individuals hold this fit mindset of passion, meaning they believe happiness comes from finding an activity or job about which they are immediately passionate, something that feels intuitively right from the get‑go.

While this mind-­ set may be the most prevalent one, it’s not necessarily best. Individuals who adopt a fit mindset of passion tend to overemphasize their initial feelings. They are more likely to choose pursuits (and especially professions) based on preliminary assessments, not potential for growth—­ even though the latter is generally more important than the former for lasting fulfillment and satisfaction.

People with fit mindsets for passion are also more likely to give up on new pursuits at the first sign of challenge or disappointment, shrugging their shoulders and thinking, I guess this isn’t for me. Furthermore, studies show that individuals with fit mindsets actually expect their passions to dwindle over time, setting themselves up for midlife crises once their initial enthusiasm for an activity has diminished. Put all this together, and a compelling story emerges: A fit mind-­ set for passion is constraining; it inherently limits one to activities that feel good immediately and makes one fragile to challenge or change.

So in the end, it’s not just that as a society we only tend to look at talent as those who show it from the get go. It’s that in our pursuits, we hold the same kind of expectations. If we aren’t good at this thing initially, it can’t be our passion. It can’t be the job or craft that we were meant to pursue.

We’ve set up our society to look for the Tiger Woods, but in doing so we might miss out on the Jim Ryuns. It’s true at a societal level and an individual one. We need to give kids and adults time to explore their interests. To dabble long enough to see if that passion and expertise grows.

The entire reason you’re reading this right now is because I was given long enough to dabble in writing. In middle school and even high school, writing wasn’t my strong point. For one, my handwriting was atrocious and my grammar wasn’t much better. I was a math and science kid. But I was fortunate enough to have teachers who encouraged me to write about what interests me, and the skill will develop over time. Initially, that meant being one of the earliest running bloggers, detailing my training as a high school and college athlete. By the time I got to graduate school, I had professors asking for help on rewriting their articles, and others encouraging me to submit some of my work for publication. Even with that, my first book was rejected by every agent and publisher because it was too technical. Fast forward to a decade later, and now my books have sold over a million copies in total.

The point is, we never know how good we will be, or whether something will truly become a passion until we’ve spent long enough exploring too. We overemphasize initial fit, spark, or signs of talent.

Development is unpredictable. Sometimes, it looks like a rocket taking off, other times it’s a slow burn where you don’t see the promise until the last possible second.

Coaching Corner: Three Applied Takeaways:

This insight came from an interview I did with Ryun. You can watch it here or on my podcast, Excellence, Actually. Three more takeaways from that conversation with Ryun:

1.Failure isn’t a verdict. It’s a detour.

The line Ryun keeps coming back to with the young runners he helps at his camp “Failure is a temporary detour to success. So hang in there and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish.”

A detour assumes you’re still going somewhere. A verdict assumes the trip is over. Most people stop after a setback because they treat it as the latter. Most kids wouldn’t have survived continually being cut from the team. Ryun didn’t treat it like an indictment on himself personally.

2. Confidence is built from small wins.

Before the records and the Olympics, Ryun was the 21st man on the cross-country team. Last man on the C squad. How’d he make progress?“You start with small successes and you build, and they become like a snowball going down a hill.”

3. Take Ownership

The night Ryun first broke four minutes at age 17, he couldn’t sleep. He started thinking: what if I take more ownership? Sleep better. Push harder in training. His words: “That moment began changing my life from being part of a program to taking on more responsibility.”

Every great performer has that moment where they get to take ownership and decide do I want to see how good I can be?

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-Steve Magness

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